🤖 AI Summary
This work addresses the challenge of meeting stringent Recovery Time Objective (RTO) requirements in distributed storage systems, where conventional content-hash-based synchronization mechanisms suffer from recovery delays due to hash index invalidation or reconstruction. To overcome this limitation, the paper proposes a lightweight, metadata-driven architecture that assigns globally unique, content-agnostic composite identifiers during write operations, thereby eliminating reliance on cryptographic hash computation. This approach enables efficient incremental synchronization without the need for hash recalculations, significantly reducing computational overhead during recovery and circumventing the hash-reconstruction bottleneck. Consequently, the proposed mechanism ensures deterministic and timely disaster recovery, effectively guaranteeing RTO compliance while enhancing the availability and resilience of distributed storage systems.
📝 Abstract
Distributed storage architectures are foundational to modern cloud-native infrastructure, yet a critical operational bottleneck persists within disaster recovery (DR) workflows: the dependence on content-based cryptographic hashing for data identification and synchronization. While hash-based deduplication is effective for storage efficiency in steady-state operation, it becomes a systemic liability during failover and failback events when hash indexes are stale, incomplete, or must be rebuilt following a crash. This paper precisely characterizes the operational conditions under which full or partial re-hashing becomes unavoidable. The paper also analyzes the downstream impact of cryptographic re-hashing on Recovery Time Objective (RTO) compliance, and proposes a generalized architectural shift toward deterministic, metadata-driven identification. The proposed framework assigns globally unique composite identifiers to data blocks at ingestion time-independent of content analysis enabling instantaneous delta computation during DR without any cryptographic overhead.